Meetup July 12th, 2016

Tuesday July 12th, 6pm

Although the building will be locked at the meeting time, we’ll have someone stationed outside to let you in. If you arrive late, call me (Stu) at 360-951-5131 and we’ll come outside and let you in the building.

Hello fellow QGIS enthusiasts,

We had a great meeting this past Tuesday; Andrew McAninch showed us how to use QGIS’s Graphical Modeler to create programs that string together multiple tools to create a custom process or simplify repetitive tasks. Graphical Modeler is similar to ESRI’s ModelBuilder, and it was great to see that functionality available in QGIS. Andrew also reviewed how to repair shapefile geometry errors using the QGIS tool prepair, and it’s comparison to the GRASS v.clean tool and ESRI’s Repair Geometry tool. Finally (Andrew is a very busy fellow!) he introduced us to the QGIS Processing Toolbox, which opens the world of other Open Source spatial analysis tools and scripts to QGIS users.

I introduced the group to the QGIS plugin nnjoin, which identifies the nearest feature to each input feature, comparable to ESRI’s Near tool.

Once again, I’m favorably pleased to see the level of functionality in QGIS, and when the cost (free!) is included, I’m overwhelmed. I’m personally excited to learn more about QGIS, which leads us to our July 12 meeting agenda:

Peter Keum has purchased the book Discover QGIS and he’ll review a few of it’s chapters for us.

Evan Derickson will present the QGIS Virtual Raster Table (VRT) technology to us. VRTs are similar to ESRI Mosaic Datasets, where multiple independent rasters can be viewed and analyzed without having to physically merge them into a single giant raster.

This is all good stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing you at our next meeting!